Howard T. Odum on Energy Equality

Odum was able to demonstrate concretely that while the United States received more than twice as much embodied energy from trade as it exported, Ecuador was exporting five times the embodied energy that it received. Trade between the two was thus enormously disadvantageous to Ecuador in real wealth terms, while providing a massive ecological benefit to the U.S. economy.

“In Environment, Power, and Society, Howard T. Odum developed a systematic methodology using energy flows to analyze the combined system of humans and nature. Odum combined Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Lotka’s hypothesis of natural selection as an energy-maximizing process into a ’general energy law’: maximization of useful work obtained from energy conversion is the criteria for natural selection. Odum coined this ’law’ ‘the maximum power principle’. The maximum power principle, while yet to be subjected to rigorous empirical testing, rests on the principles of natural selection set forth by Darwin and Lotka. Odum observed that ecological and other systems that survive and prosper used energy at some ’optimum’ rate ’better’ than competing energy utilization strategies. Since human systems are subjected to the same energy constraints as any other system, Odum suggests that any ethic for the survival of humans must meet this same logical and cultural, operated on differential rates and efficiencies of energy use by ecosystems and economies.

Two of Odum’s most important contributions to biophysical economics are energy quality and the countercurrent flow of energy and money in the economy. Energy quality refers to the relative ability of the economy to use different fuels to produce economic output per heat equivalent burned. Odum argued that because fuels differ in quality, societies with access to higher-quality fuels have an economic advantage over those with access to lower quality fuels. Odum also stressed the importance of matching economic tasks with fuels of appropriate quality. High-quality fuels such as electricity are best used to control the flow of larger, lower-quality flows in the economy. Electricity is well-suited to operating a computer which can perform tremendous amounts of work per kcal of electricity. Electricity used for space heating is a poor use of high-quality energy because space heat could also be provided by lower-quality fuels such as petroleum, coal or wood.

Odum argued that energy was the source of economic value. He pointed out that wherever a dollar flow existed in the economy, there was a requirement for an energy flow in the opposite direction. Money is used to buy goods and services, of necessity derived from energy. Each purchase operates through the economy as a feedback, stimulating more energy to be drawn from the ground and into the economy to produce additional goods and services. Money circulates in a closed loop, whereas low-entropy energy moves in from the outside, is used for economic tasks, and then leaves the economic system as degraded heat. Odum also observed that the large natural energy flows—solar radiation, water, wind, etc.—that are essential for life, have no associated dollar flows. The costs of using these energy flows do not, therefore, enter into economic transactions directly, often leading to their misuse or the mismanagement of life-sustaining environmental services.”

Here is what Monthly Review writes:

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark:

“Odum, who spent the last two decades of his life perfecting a devastating ecological critique of neoclassical economics in which he repeatedly emphasized the overlap between his views and Marx, provided perhaps the clearest and most comprehensive analysis of what needs to be done in the face of the planetary crisis. He argued that it was possible to find a social resolution to conditions of climax accumulation represented by ecological overshoot by altering the structure of production and consumption on a global scale and reorienting the economic system to real wealth. This meant recognizing that “a principal waste in our society is using fuels in nonproductive activity. We drive more cars than necessary, drive them too often, and drive cars with too much horsepower. We use cars for commuting because cities are not organized with alternative transportation. Because higher costs of energy do cause people to eliminate some stupid wastes, higher fuel taxes may be needed in the United States for these wasteful uses.”

Crucial to the development of sustainable economic conditions, Odum insisted, was the elimination of unequal ecological exchange. He demonstrated that in the late 1990s the United States was gaining 2.5 times more real wealth (i.e., embodied energy) than it exported, mainly to the disadvantage of underdeveloped countries. Needed social change also required “controlling global capitalism’s inherent tendency for short-term exploitation of resources,” which could undermine the national/international “resource basis…causing collapse.” Capitalist growth was “identified,” in his conception, “as a large-scale analog of weed overgrowth.”

Globally, “the exclusive dominance of large-scale capitalism” should be “replaced with an emphasis on cooperation with the environment and among nations.”

In order to transcend what he called a “cancerous capitalism” that overdrafted resources and energy, Odum insisted that it would be essential to eliminate the economic and ecological “waste and luxury” that did not support jobs, real productivity, and real wealth.

Odum was clear that this transition required a break with “imperial capitalism.” “Socialistic ideals about distribution,” he observed, “are more consistent with [a] steady state than growth,” while for capitalism it was exactly the opposite.

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Ecological footprint analysis tells us that the world is in overshoot, currently using resources at a rate that would be sustainable for one and a half planet Earths. The main source of this environmental overdraft is to be found in the excesses of the rich countries, which are now, however, being duplicated throughout the globe. Indeed, if the whole world were to have the ecological footprint per capita of the United States, five Earths would be needed. The very size of the ecological footprint of a rich economy such as the United States is an indication of its heavy reliance on unequal ecological exchange, extracting resources from the rest of the globe, particularly underdeveloped countries, in order to enhance its own growth and power.

Odum was able to demonstrate concretely that while the United States received more than twice as much embodied energy from trade as it exported, Ecuador was exporting five times the embodied energy that it received. Trade between the two was thus enormously disadvantageous to Ecuador in real wealth terms, while providing a massive ecological benefit to the U.S. economy.

It follows that the downsizing of ecological footprints to get the world back in accord with environmental limits must necessarily fall very disproportionately on the rich capitalist countries. The only just and sustainable solution is one of contraction and convergence, whereby global per capita carbon emissions and ecological footprints are equalized, along with the elimination of unequal ecological exchange.
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Odum insisted that increasing constraints on fossil-fuel use would spell the end of today’s petrofarming system. “The high yields from industrial agriculture generated a very cruel illusion because the citizens, the teachers, and the leaders did not understand the energetics involved…. A whole generation of citizens thought that higher efficiencies in using the energy of the sun had arrived. This was a sad hoax, for people of the developed world no longer eat potatoes made from solar energy…. People are really eating potatoes made partly of oil.”79

Without the subsidy provided by the fossil fuels, today’s agribusiness system will simply collapse. As a result it will be necessary to return to more ecologically efficient forms of traditional agriculture. In this way, the knowledge system will be inverted. Rather than agribusiness corporations providing knowledge to traditional peasant farmers, it will be the latter who will be the inspiration for the most appropriate agriculture, rooted in thousands of years of cumulative knowledge of soil cultivation, supplemented by the advancements associated with modern agroecology. “Policies about population and development appropriate to low-energy restoration,” Odum wrote, “may be like those formerly found in low-energy cultures like the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela.””

WRITTEN BY

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder and president of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world.
In the first semester of 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a 'social knowledge economy'.
In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents. Commons Transition aims toward a society of the Commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable world. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics.